An Empirical Comparison of Code Size Limit in Auto-Constructive Artificial Life

This paper presents an evolving swarm system of flying agents simulated as a collective intelligence within the Breve auto-constructive artificial life environment. The behavior of each agent is governed by genetically evolved program codes expressed in the Push programming language. There are two objectives in this paper, that is to investigate the effects of firstly code size limit and secondly two different versions of the Push genetic programming language on the auto-constructive evolution of artificial life. We investigated these genetic programming code elements on reproductive competence using a measure based on the self-sustainability of the population. Self-sustainability is the point in time when the current population's agents are able to reproduce enough offspring to maintain the minimum population size without any new agents being randomly injected from the system. From the results, we found that the Push2 implementation showed slightly better evolvability than Push3 in terms of achieving self-sufficiency. In terms of code size limit, the reproductive competence of the collective swarm was affected quite significantly at certain parameter settings.